Sky Watch by J. Alex Knoll

The dark hours at week’s end are still brightened by the glow of the waning Hunter’s Moon, which rises mid-evening and dominates the night sky until daybreak. On clear days this week, you may even see the moon in the west after sunrise.

With sunrise now after 7am, perhaps you’ve seen an exceptionally bright light in the south before dawn? Looking up, did you see the constellation Orion? That’s Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, known as the Dog Star for its place amid Canis Major. Sirius rises around 2am in the east-southeast. Close to the horizon, it pulses a dazzling rainbow of colors, its light refracted by earth’s atmosphere like that from a prism. Closer to daybreak, when Sirius is high in the south, its light cuts through less of our atmosphere and appears a brilliant, cold white.

Week’s end finds the waning crescent moon in the company of Jupiter before dawn. Around 6am Friday morning, look for the moon high in the east with Jupiter to its lower left. The same time Saturday the moon shines just six degrees from Old Jove. Then Sunday, the now razor-thin crescent is well below Jupiter, while the first-magnitude star Regulus, is just six degrees away.

The waning moon rises in the late evening at week’s end and is high in the southwest with the approach of the rising sun. Each night it rises a half-hour later, so that by last-quarter on the 15th it crests the northeast horizon at midnight.

The moon waxes through our evening skies from a thin crescent at week’s end to first-quarter Tuesday September 2. Friday Luna shines just two degrees above the first-magnitude star Spica low in the southwest.
Sunday the moon appears farther east at sunset, forming a tight triangle with Saturn to the west and Mars to the south. The two planets appear equally bright, shining at magnitude 0.6, but Saturn’s golden glow and Mars’ red hue make them easy to tell apart.

Each August, as the kids head back to school, the galaxy is tilted in such a way that the Milky Way stretches overhead in full glory. With Monday’s new moon, this may be the best week of summer to gaze on this river of stars. To fully appreciate it you’ll need dark skies away from any urban glow well after sunset. Give your eyes a few minutes to get accustomed to the darkness, tilt your head back and get lost in the glow.

As twilight settles to darkness, look to the southwest for ruddy Mars beside the ice-blue of Spica until they set around midnight. Mars is the brighter of the two. They will be their closest Sunday, with less than 1.5 degrees separating them. After that, Mars keeps on trucking, setting course for a conjunction with Saturn on August 4.

Friday’s new moon provides a dark backdrop for the annual Boötid meteor shower, which peaks after sunset that night and before dawn Saturday. Most years the Boötids are a modest shower, topping out at a dozen meteors an hour. But every now and then, it storms.

In the early morning Saturday, at 6:51am EDT, the sun reaches its northernmost point in the sky for the year, with its center hovering directly above the Tropic of Cancer somewhere in Africa. On solstice, the sun appears to pause in place, holding steady for several days directly overhead at high noon — solstice in fact means sun standing still. You can see proof of the sun standing still in this week’s times of sunrise and sunset, listed below, which barely change.